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A.I. Needs an Audit Trail. It Also Needs Someone to Own It.

The rapid deployment of A.I. agents is creating a new accountability problem that contracts, disclosures and model evaluations alone cannot solve.

You share your health records with your doctor’s system. An agent assists with the diagnosis. Another writes the prescription. The pharmacy runs an agent that checks and dispenses. A drone delivers it. The wrong medication arrives. Who is responsible? At best, each system produces a log of what it did. Most companies cannot even do that. Where they can, none captures the handoff: what the diagnostic agent passed to the prescriber, what the pharmacy received and checked. Each party holds a record that proves its own innocence and explains nothing about what happened between systems. Fault lands on whoever the patient can see. That chain is still a few years out. The question it raises has already reached a courtroom.

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In October 2024, a Florida mother sued Character Technologies and Google after her 14-year-old son died by suicide following months of conversation with an A.I. companion. Seven months later, Judge Anne Conway allowed most of the claims to proceed, and two of her rulings matter for every company deploying these systems.

The first was that Character A.I. is a product for the purposes of the product liability claims, where those claims target the design of the app rather than the content it produced. A product is judged on whether the thing itself was defectively designed. The alleged defects were ordinary decisions: no age confirmation, no reporting mechanism, Characters programmed to use human mannerisms and no way to........

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